


Two Go Together

by Anonymous



Category: Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, M/M, POV Male Character, POV Third Person Limited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-20
Updated: 2015-02-20
Packaged: 2018-03-13 21:00:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3396158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[Unfinished work]</p><p>Will shook his head at the circle his thoughts ran.  He had gotten used to the choice his friend, former ally against the Dark, had made.  After all, it had been in the prophecy, hadn’t it?  “Five shall return, and one go alone.”</p><p>Loneliness was nothing to an Old One on guard against the Dark, watching for eternity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Go Together

**Author's Note:**

> No beta, no britpick. Created in 2001, last worked on in 2007, for those curious.

Will had got a note.

Quietly, without fanfare, a note that said, simply, “Come back and visit. Bran.” And if Will could find a way to deny that simple request, he did not try, but put the rest of things aside and went back. To visit, after all these years.

The letter said nothing of what had happened in the meantime, and Will knew better than to worry about all the news he had missed. If he had felt the need to know, he would have asked long before now. In this, he felt oddly grateful for Bran’s brevity. It also unsettled him.

Bran did not know of the unavoidable duty to the Light that Will had; yet he seemed to understand that Will was busy with more important things than gossip from the Welsh hills. Then again, Will had left and never looked back, or so it must appear. That was not a thing that lent itself to sudden outpourings of news from an odd family acquaintance.

Will shook his head at the circle his thoughts ran. He had gotten used to the choice his friend, former ally against the Dark, had made. After all, it had been in the prophecy, hadn’t it? “ _Five shall return, and one go alone_.”

Loneliness was nothing to an Old One on guard against the Dark, watching for eternity.

***

Bran was not at the house when Will arrived, late in the afternoon. Will cast about with his mind, searching, until he simply began walking, letting memory guide him across the hills. Now and then he would stop, throw his head back to the wind or to watch the great grey clouds lumber across the sky in infinitesimal increments, but he would always return to his path.

He was not going towards the Old Way, high on the mountainside, but towards something he knew Bran would remember instead. He found Bran where he expected him to be, a long-limbed shape of contrasting white and black beside a gravesite in the hill. There was a stone to mark the death of one who had been lost to the Dark’s deceit during that last great struggle.

“Hallo,” Bran called quietly, somberly, as befitted the place, standing when Will drew near.

“Hallo.” Will replied, dropping his head down.

Bran nodded, his glasses blocking his gaze. “Glad you could make it.”

Will squinted up the hill at him, angling himself on the steep ground so he could sit properly. “Good of you to ask me,” he replied equably. “Did you not think I would come?” Bran closed the distance between them somewhat, settling on the ground again beside Will.

“I did get your note. I saw your car on the road over past that ridge.” Something about the reply made Will pause, refrain from asking why Bran was up here at this hour, when he had known Will was on his way.

“How have you been?” He asked instead, feeling moisture on the air and glanced at the press of storm clouds out of the corner of his eye.

“Good. Busy.” Bran looked off into the distance, apparently still reluctant to speak much.

“Of course,” Will agreed easily, shooting a look over at the other man. The years had been hard, he could see from the drawn lines of Bran’s face, though he could not begin to guess the source. He began to wonder if he should have kept up more on events.

A gust of wind, cold and humid, sliced across the hillside, and Will felt a few large droplets of rain hit his skin. The weather front was visible from their vantage point, a wall of rain snaking swiftly across the sky towards them. Will shivered.

Bran stood, holding out a hand to him. “Come on, then, we should talk inside.” Will wondered what there was to talk about, but followed Bran along the dark pastures anyway. Save for the sounds of the hills around them, the journey was silent and somehow felt longer than it had taken Will to travel the distance from house to Cafall’s grave. The front edge of rainfall reached them, and they began to run through the slanting storm as soon as the house came into view.

They got inside the door, and Will finally felt the chill in his bones as it came up against the warmth of a fire. He pressed his palm against the fingers of his other hand, and felt cold bite into his skin.

“Let me put some tea on, you look blue,” Bran said by way of apology. “There’s a blanket on the chair by the fire, towels in the closet, there.”

Will wrapped himself in the blanket and sat by the fireplace, watching the cooling embers flicker. He murmured a few words in the Old Speech, muffled by the blanket’s edge, to the fire and it flared up in appreciation of his pretty greetings.

“What did you say?” Bran called out, bringing in two heavy mugs of tea. He set both on the low table. “Warmer?” Will’s hands closed gratefully around the heat of the ceramic, and he nodded.

“Yes, much. I just got the chills.” Will supposed things were going well, though he still did not understand things quite yet. He simply waited, taking a careful sip of tea before setting down the mug, watching for the pensive expression to lift from Bran’s face.

Bran had changed into a dry, mended shirt of some dark, soft fabric, and tucked his sunglasses away somewhere. Will had seen no sign of Bran’s (adopted) father, Owen Davies, and remembered absently that his uncle had added buildings to the farm, and most of the hands lived closer in now. Bran had simply stayed on, it seemed.

“It was dark out there, and cold. That’s why you thanked the fire for being so cheery and bright, I suppose…” Bran commented at last.

Will snapped out of his reverie with some puzzlement. Gold eyes, framed by lashes of ice, pinned him. “I remember,” Bran said, meaningfully, in a lilting whisper that made Will’s blood drain from his face until, he was sure, he had no pigment left, either. Bran’s simple announcement had opened up an old ache in Will, one that he had been doing well to ignore.

“I could make you forget again,” Will replied suddenly. He did not know why he had said it, but now it was there, hanging between them.

Bran blinked. Obviously, the statement had surprised even him. “D’you think I want to, _dewin_?”

“You did,” and Will paused. “Once.”

Bran nodded, his gaze drifting past Will, into the distance. “We drove back the Dark, Will, except those remnants of it within man. And, as a man, I faced it, knowing, knowing…” His eyes snapped back to meet Will’s curious gaze. “I knew I had done something already so great that fighting men like Caradog Pritchard was nothing, though the pain men cause may be greater.” He did not need to mention Cafall, but again Will wondered at what else Bran had faced, since.

“When?” Will asked.

“Just after I sent off that note. I’d been having… dreams, maybe. Visions, more like, of the Dark and the Light. The harp. Merriman. The sleepers…” Bran squinted, as if trying to call back the dreams in his mind’s eye. “I saw you, too, but as an Old One, and I didn’t know what it meant. So I was going to ask you.”

Will huddled deeper into the blanket, drawing it about him like a cloak, in unconscious imitation of his Master, but he saw the reflection of it in Bran’s arched eyebrow. “I could make you forget again.” Will repeated it in a murmur, more of a reminder, but there was a hint of entreaty in his voice, just as there was a hint of the youth in the Old One that he was.

“Do you think I would make you stand watch alone forever?” Bran’s true self shone through in this query, not wholly Pendragon or Davies boy. Will marveled that his friend had reconciled both so easily where the contradictions rested so heavily on his own shoulders.

“‘Five shall return, and one go alone’…” Will quoted, unflinchingly. “I learned to live with the prospect of a long and lonely watch.” The words felt wrong, somehow, in his mouth. He tried again. “I found I could live without…” It was right, this statement, but he could not finish it. He did not like this truth.

“Do you really believe that, after facing life so empty these few years, I could once again give up that which filled it?” Bran said slowly, phrasing his words so carefully that he gave away just as much as Will had.

Will stood, having seen the truth in Bran’s face rather than in his words. He did not know if it were to flee, or take some other action he had never anticipated. The fire seemed to flicker at his sudden motion. Will looked away from what he had seen a moment ago, staring instead at the warmly dancing embers, finding himself repeating his own words again, “You did, once.”

“I didn’t know then,” Bran confessed. He stood, too, wrapping his arms about himself, his fingertips digging into the dark ridges of a corduroy patch on one arm. “I know now.”

Will sighed, shook his head. “I ought make you forget again, you realize.”

“Perhaps.” Bran almost smiled. “Let us stand watch together, Will.”

“Eternity is a long time. Could you stand me that long?” And Will looked up at Bran through the ends of his dark hair, finding the other man suddenly closer than he expected.

“No one else, certainly,” Bran said in a whisper, reaching out with fingers calloused by harp-strings to draw Will to him. An inch apart, they paused, their gazes open, endless, mirroring wonder. “Come here,” Bran breathed, and then there was only the smooth slow glide of mouths to fill their thoughts.

After a long moment, they broke for air. Will found himself again sitting in the chair, Bran wrapped closely around him. Steely, sinewy thighs pressed into his hipbones. Bran was quietly laughing, exultant, the fingers of one hand curling into Will’s nape.

“Is this what you were expecting, knowing I was on my way?” Will asked, tipping his head to one side as he combed his hand through Bran’s white, white hair.

“Not exactly this, no,” Bran admitted, a light flush coloring his cheeks. “Hoping, maybe.”

“Is that why I had to come and find you? You thought I’d deny you this?” Will asked, trailing one finger across the other man’s face.

“Should have known better, eh?” Bran smiled again, happy.

Will drank in the sight of him, all frosty skin and tawny eyes. He moved, slightly, and the smile slipped from Bran’s face. They both hissed at the unexpected contact. Will’s eyes slipped closed, and he began murmuring, “beautiful, beautiful raven boy…” He could not bear to say it and see Bran laughing at his silly words. They moved again against each other.

He felt Bran’s breath at his ear. “I had dreams of this, too.” He was not laughing, and Will opened his eyes again. Bran smiled, gently, stilling them both with a hand on Will’s chest. “Easy now, Old One,” he said quietly, his hands traveling down the row of buttons, unfastening them one by one.

Will arched into the touch, seeking Bran’s mouth again and recapturing it as Bran’s arms circled round his sides beneath the shirt. A slick, warm tongue slipped into his mouth, and he gasped against Bran’s lips. He tried to rock against Bran’s hips again and found no purchase in the softness of the chair.

Bran pulled away, a frown flashing across his features before he smiled in easy recognition. “Come on,” he said, standing, a hand out for Will to take. Will stared up at him, flushed and feeling debauched. Which, he thought wryly, he probably was… He heaved himself out of the chair, pulling Bran back for another one of those unending kisses.

***

**Author's Note:**

> (sorry)


End file.
